Where is Sanity's data physically stored? Concerned about Australia latency

Great question about data location and latency! I totally understand the concern when you're based in Australia.

Primary Data Storage Location

Sanity's Content Lake data is stored in St. Ghislain, Belgium, using Google Cloud Platform infrastructure (specifically Google Compute Engine and Google Container Engine). Currently, you can't select a different region for your primary dataset storage, though Sanity has mentioned plans to offer regional data residency options in the future.

But Here's the Good News About Latency

While the primary storage is in Belgium, Sanity has specifically optimized for global performance, including Australia:

1. API CDN with Australian POP: Sanity's API CDN includes a point of presence (POP) in Australia, which dramatically reduces latency for content delivery. The CDN serves cached content with unlimited rate limits.

2. Stale-While-Revalidate Strategy: This is a game-changer. Sanity's CDN uses a "stale-while-revalidate" approach, meaning it serves cached content to users while updating in the background. Even if your editors are frequently publishing, end users typically never experience a cache miss during sustained traffic.

3. Real-World Australian Performance: Sanity has multiple large customers in Australia who haven't reported latency issues. One Melbourne-based developer in the community thread mentioned they don't notice lag in local dev and have been building with Sanity for over a year.

4. Where CDN Really Helps: For most use cases, especially if you're building with static site generation (Next.js SSG/ISR, Gatsby, etc.) or caching renders on your side, the CDN handles the majority of your traffic from the Australian POP with 15-20ms response times.

Performance Considerations

• Uncached queries: If you're making direct API queries that bypass the CDN, you'll see the Belgium roundtrip (350-700ms as noted by one Australian user testing). However, with sustained traffic, the CDN's stale-while-revalidate keeps content fresh without users experiencing those delays.
• Studio editing: The Sanity Studio is coded to hide latency by recording edits locally and reconciling with the server behind the scenes, so editors won't feel the distance.

Bottom Line

For most Australian use cases, especially with the API CDN's Australian POP and smart caching strategies, latency shouldn't be a dealbreaker. If you're concerned about your specific architecture, I'd recommend doing some real-world performance testing with sustained traffic patterns rather than isolated queries, as the CDN behavior is quite different under actual load.